This is one of my (many) favorite poems by the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1996. I found this great reading of the poem out there on SoundCloud a while back.

A little while back I wrote a post on the Fleet Foxes Maida Vale session recording of “The Shrine / An Argument“. I was thinking back on the little Yeats reference in the song, and that early Romantic and Irish folklore-inspired era of his poetry, so I thought I’d follow it up with this track… Read More ›

In this way, Morton argues, our need to get a more immediate, superficial sharing, and to feel good about ourselves as a result, protects us from recognizing our deeper and more threatening sharing, a more terrifying similarity: we’ve done things more like the murderer than we can bear. It’s not a crass relativism, Morton’s idea;… Read More ›

If Proust visited his rituals on Cocteau, friendship with Proust could not be otherwise than ritualistic. It involved verbal spoofs, labyrinthine excuses, nocturnal happenings, dinners at the Ritz, and whipped chocolate at Larue, recitations from Swann in the cork-lined bedroom, cab rides observing the fixed, hermetic itinerary of a drunk. Proust’s rare outings by day… Read More ›

Now here’s this, because I know what she’s thinking about . . . sigh. This animated short is based on the book I Want A Dog, by Dayal Kaur Khalsa. We have it on DVD, as part of a set of short films from Scholastic based on, and using the illustrations from, great children’s picture books…. Read More ›

Transgression is an action which involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage, but perhaps also its entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely that transgression has its entire space in the line it crosses. The play of limits and transgression incessantly crosses and… Read More ›

I’m very excited because I just heard, via one of my favorite reading-related sites, LitHub, that Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita is being made into a movie. I only just found out about the book and read it a couple of years ago, and I was just thinking about re-reading it, I loved it so much. Some reviewers argue pretty… Read More ›

He thought of his mother. She had asked him to bring her back to her birthplace and he had done so, though perhaps only by a trick of words. But what if this farm was not her true birthplace? Where were the stone walls of the wagonhouse she had spoken of? He made himself pay… Read More ›